Grace McCarrick attended a luxury eco-retreat organized by OpenAI late last month, around July 2026, expecting an experience she could share online. Instead, the Instagram personality and self-styled public speaker faced backlash after posting a video of herself running a bath during the retreat.
A week after attending, McCarrick addressed the reaction in a LinkedIn post. She said she had not understood how strong the opposition to artificial intelligence had become, writing, “I genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI.”
A retreat becomes a public argument
McCarrick did not treat the criticism as a simple disagreement over a sponsored experience. She accused her critics of spreading misinformation and defended her actions by pointing to the behavior of people criticizing her. In her post, she described the criticism as “This steeped in misinformation about it.”
She also pushed back against people concerned about AI’s effect on the environment, writing, “This crazed by the idea of it ruining the planet.” The wording became part of a broader dispute over whether creators who promote AI understand the concerns behind the backlash.
McCarrick thanked her friends and family for defending her after the response to the retreat. She said the experience had left her with lasting emotional damage, while also making clear that she did not regret attending or sharing what happened.
“Like many experiences being a visible person online, I don’t regret my actions prior, I don’t regret going through it, but I’m certainly coming out with some battle scars,” McCarrick wrote.
Another person who attended the retreat, developer advocate Megan Lieu, disabled comments on her social media posts about it. That decision shows how quickly discussion of the event moved from a product promotion into a fight over the role of creators, criticism, and public accountability.
Why AI promotions are drawing more anger
OpenAI organized the luxury retreat so influencers could promote its products. Paris Marx, an AI critic and journalist, said OpenAI understands the public mood around the technology and uses influencer getaways to encourage positive messages.
“OpenAI is very aware of the public’s opinion of it, motivating it to organize lavish influencer getaways to have them say good things about their products,” Marx stated.
That criticism lands in a creator community already dealing with strong reactions to AI. Content creators such as Hank Green and Cliff Tan have been scolded by fans for using or promoting AI, showing that audiences are watching how familiar online personalities approach the technology.
The anger is tied to several concerns. People worry about data centers, job displacement, and price hikes on tech products. Those issues have fueled a growing negative view of AI, making a luxury retreat designed around promotion easier for critics to treat as a symbol of the divide.
The dispute is not only about whether an influencer enjoyed a retreat. It is also about what audiences expect when creators accept access or opportunities connected to AI companies. A creator may see the event as a personal experience, while followers may see the same event as promotion for products tied to wider social and economic concerns.
That gap helps explain why McCarrick’s bath video drew attention beyond the retreat itself. The video presented a private moment from a luxury eco-retreat, but the backlash focused on who organized the experience and what the event was meant to achieve.
Creators caught between promotion and trust
McCarrick’s response shows how personal the conflict became. She defended her choices, criticized the information used by detractors, and thanked people close to her for standing by her. At the same time, the episode placed her inside a much larger argument over AI and the responsibilities of visible people online.
Lieu’s decision to disable comments added another example of the pressure surrounding the retreat. McCarrick’s public response and Lieu’s closed comment sections offered different ways to handle the same reaction, but both reflected the difficult position creators can face when they promote AI-related products.
The backlash involving Hank Green and Cliff Tan shows that this pressure reaches beyond one OpenAI event. Fans are not treating AI as a neutral tool when they see creators use or endorse it. They are connecting those choices to data centers, jobs, and the cost of technology.
For OpenAI, the retreat placed influencer promotion directly in front of a skeptical audience. For creators, it showed that accepting an AI-related opportunity can bring a response they did not expect. McCarrick’s surprise at the anti-AI sentiment became one of the clearest parts of the controversy because it exposed the distance between the retreat’s promotional setting and the public concerns surrounding AI.
As the backlash grows, creators who work with AI companies face a choice about how openly they explain those relationships. The retreat showed that a polished experience can still trigger a rough public debate, especially when audiences believe the promotion ignores concerns about the technology’s wider effects.
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